Letter cards

Posted on October 21, 2025 by dgm

Over the past year or so I’ve developed a slow burn fascination with late Victorian and Edwardian postcards.

I don’t simply collect them, when I get a new one I try my hand at transcribing the card and trying to trace the addressees.

It sounds voyeuristic, and perhaps it is, but it allows me to practice my family history research skills as well as my ability to read late nineteenth century handwriting.

I’m not a regular collector by any means, only buying four or five a year, but I do spend some time scouring ebay and etsy for interesting looking examples.

And in the process of looking for postcards to transcribe, I occasionally come across items described as letter cards

So what were letter cards?

First issued by the Belgian post office in 1882, they consisted of a sheet of postcard weight card which was prefolded and had a line of adhesive around the edge that gave you an area slightly smaller than a standard sheet of Victorian era writing paper – about one and a half times the size of an A6 page today -on which to write your message. You then sealed the card and posted it.

The recipient then tore round the perforation to open the card and read the message.

The principal advantages of the letter card, as opposed to a post card were that they were private and you could send a longer message. The disadvantage was that they cost as much to send as an ordinary letter.

In Australia, the Victorian Post Office was the first to issue them in 1889, three years before the United Kingdom in 1892.

Letter cards were never terribly popular as they didn’t offer any real advantage over a standard letter, but they clung on as an item of postal stationery until the late seventies, or perhaps early eighties.

One advantage was that if you needed to send a letter and didn’t have stamps, paper and envelopes to hand you could buy a letter card from a post office, write your message and drop them in the mail.

I remember using one myself in the very late seventies during a cycling trip round the Western Isles of Scotland when I missed a ferry due to mechanical trouble and had to write to a friend to reschedule a catch-up on the way back and ask them to buy me a couple of spare inner tubes and a new tyre.

Nowadays it would be a text message or an email.

I’ve come across so few examples on collectors’ websites, that unlike postcards, I’ve no real picture in my mind of how they were used in the early part of the twentieth century.

There’s some evidence that they were used by members of the AIF to send messages home during world war one (and perhaps also world war two), but I havn’t been able as yet to find any definitive record of their use on a regular basis.

Certainly, being made of card they would have been as easy for the military postal service to handle as a field postcard, but would have provided service men a way of sending a private or intimate message, although the military censors might have had something to say about that….

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The Featherstone riots of 1893

Posted on October 4, 2025 by dgm

This past few months I’ve been researching the interconnections between various translators of nineteenth century Russian novels, radical Russian exiles and the birth of the socialist movement in England.

Along the way we’ve had a diversion or two, such as the unlikely story of a pair of English anarchists cycling all the way to Yasnaya Polyana to meet with Tolstoy (spoiler – they didn’t), and possible connections via the utopian side of the English socialist movement and the rather more serious business of RSDLP meeting in exile in 1907.

However, so far I havn’t really investigated a darker side of the growth of the socialist movement in the north of England.

At the end of September in 1893 a group of anarchists (which basically meant socialists and other left leaning people) started having noisy public meetings at Ardwick Green in Manchester, which annoyed the local vicar.

At first the police were conciliatory and offered them an alternative location for their meetings.

The anarchists refused and the meeting was quite violently broken up by the police led by Detective Inspector Caminada who broke his umbrella while whacking one of the anarchists.

The fight was reported in various local newspapers at the time, and while blows were certainly exchanged, it seems no worse, and no more significant than a pub fight on a Saturday night.

Various of the anarchists were arrested, who included Alf Barton, later to become associated with the Independent Labour party and the co-operative movement.

In Caminada’s account of the trial, he mentions that one of the anarchists, as well as being fined, had to pay towards the replacement of Caminada’s umbrella, likened it to the Featherstone miners having to pay for the bullets used against them.

Now I actually know Featherstone. It’s a hard scrabble former mining town in West Yorkshire on the outside of Wakefield that nowadays is principally famous for its rugby league side.

But it has a dark secret.

It’s the last town in England where the army was used to fire on striking miners.

Now you might think that this happened during the pull plug riots of the 1840s, but no, it happened much later, in September 1893.

In 1893 the price of coal collapsed due to cheap imports and an oversupply of domestically mined coal.

The mine owners sought to preserve their profits by cutting wages, reducing hours worked, and sacking miners. Needless to say, this did not play well with the miners.

In Featherstone the miners were blockading one of the pits in the town, and the police were called to disperse them and allow the coal wagons to come and go.

It turned into a fight and barrels of tar and oil were set on fire and stones were thrown at the police, who retaliated by charging the crowd, with little or no effect. The police were under strength as several officers had been transferred to Doncaster to help police the St Leger horse race.

Fearing an attempt to burn down the pit buildings the riot act was read and the army called at the request of the pit owner.

The army were supposed to fire over the heads of the strikers, but instead fired into the crowd.

Two volleys were fired, the first harmless, the second resulting in the deaths of two of the striking miners.

Strangely, the shootings seem to have been little reported at first, and treated more as a minor detail by the London press, although the local press in Yorkshire reported the shootings.

Demonstrations in solidarity with the victims were held all across the Yorkshire coal field and as far way as Glasgow.

Times had changed and the government responded by convening a public enquiry into the shootings to try and defuse things.

The enquiry claimed that all procedures had been followed correctly, including the reading of the Riot Act and the warnings issued to the strikers. The army officer responsible for issuing an order to fire was exonerated as he was only ‘doing his duty’, but in a tacit admission that things should not have turned out that way, the government offered compensation to the families of the victims.

It’s worth remembering that while women had won the right to vote in New Zealand in 1893, in England there was still a property qualification that effectively denied most working men the right to vote – most poorer families rented their houses for six or seven pounds a year and hence did not qualify as either they did not own their own homes or pay more than ten pounds a year in rent, and as for women, a limited right to vote was thirty years in the future.

This means that the miners really did not have anyone other than the trade unions to support them and that the whole system was weighted against them.

The enquiry seems to have been enough to calm matters, especially as the coal strike was settled in the mean time and the miners had gone back to work.

It wasn’t quite the end of it though, the miners of Featherstone came out on strike again in January 1894 on being denied a day’s holiday on New Year’s Day.

This time the mine owners caved in and settled the dispute in the miners’ favour.

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Tea and the English Class System

Posted on September 16, 2025 by dgm

Three Victorian Ladies drinking tea – public domain

Recently, I’ve been reading Sam Llewellyn’s Shadow in the Sands (ignore Amazon’s silly pricing – second hand copies are available for a few dollars).

The novel is positioned as a sequel to Erskine Childers’ Riddle of the Sands – one of my favourite books – and for that reason I would normally avoid Llewellyn’s book for fear of spoiling my affection for Childers’ book, but this would be a mistake.

The book’s well written, and while it cleverly links to Childers’ book with some characters in common it can be read as a stand alone novel if you are so inclined.

It’s also very good on its portrayal of the class divides of English society at the end of the long nineteenth century.

And this leads us to tea drinking.

There’s a scene in which Dacre – upper class officer type, and nasty with it – when served a mug of tea asks ‘Don’t you have any china?’ to which the reply comes ‘It is sir, didn’t I boil it enough?’

And this neatly encapsulates the class divide around tea in nineteenth century Britain.

I hadn’t really thought about this before, but the middle and upper classes preferred quality tea, Ceylon or Assam, which was drunk black or with lemon to let them concentrate on the flavour of the tea. (Strangely, when I was in Sri Lanka, ten or more years ago, I had a dickens of a job persuading waiters in cafes that I wanted a weaker black tea without milk, and even then it was still pretty strong.)

Tea was expensive, and so when working class people bought tea, to be drunk as an alternative to beer with a meal, they bought the cheapest black tea going and steeped it in hot water as long as possible to get a strong black brew to which they added milk and sugar – a bit like what we call ‘Builder’s Tea’ today.

And so, how you liked your tea said something about your social class.

Of course, it’s not a universal rule, my father, despite coming from a family of tenant farmers, but who had lived in India and Malaysia, preferred his tea black, or with a slice of lemon, while my mother preferred hers with milk and sugar.

(Personally, I prefer my tea weak and black – English Breakfast in the morning, Russian Caravan in the afternoon, while J will only drink lemon scented or Earl Grey, again weak and black. I’m not sure what that says about us…)

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The Panjdeh crisis and Australia

Posted on September 14, 2025 by dgm

As I’ve written before there was a major panic in 1885 that, on the back of the Panjdeh incident, there might be war between Britain and Russia, including the chance of an attack on the east coast of Australia by the Russian pacific fleet.

To add to the general feeling of unsettlement, there were fears about the impact of the German colonisation of New Guinea, fears that led Queensland in 1883 to attempt to colonise Papua as a bulwark against further German expansion on behalf of the British Empire, only to be roundly told off by the government in London that colonies could not establish colonies, and more interestingly, that colonisation might be met with some resistance by the indigenous population. [UK Hansard April 1883 :: Courier Brisbane June 1883]

However, by the middle of the year the panic had largely subsided, although in June a visitor to Cooktown was mistaken as a Russian spy, and detained before being released by the local magistrate.

After then seems to have ceased to panic about spies and invasion and returned to more prosaic concerns such as the sale of under strength rum…

Riverine Herald Echuca November 1885

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Iron 2 heller

Posted on September 7, 2025 by dgm

A few weeks ago I wrote about how both Imperial Germany and Austria Hungary replaced their small change during world war one with coins made of base metals such as iron as the as the metal from the original coins was needed for the war effort.

At the time I only had examples from Germany and the Hungarian half of the AustriaHungary.

Since then I’ve acquired this example of a 2 Heller Austrian coin

Note the complete lack of any inscription other than the value and the date.

Unlike the Hungarian part of the empire, in the German speaking part of the empire there was a recognition that not everyone spoke German, and hence the low value coins simply carried the imperial eagle on one side and the value and date of issue on the reverse.

Higher value coins such as 1krone coins usually carried the value on the reverse and the emperor’s image and titles (in Latin in the German half of the empire, after all no one spoke Latin, and in Hungarian in Hungarian portion of the empire).

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Cooktown and the Panjdeh crisis of 1885

Posted on September 7, 2025 by dgm

Over on one of my other blogs I mention that there seems to be some confusion over the provenance of the Cooktown gun.

The myth is that in 1885 the town council was worried about a Russian invasion an requested help to defend the town, and were sent a single old and useless Napoleonic wars cannon

I havn’t got to the end of the story, but it’s true that in 1885 there was a major panic in Australia about the possibility of war with Russia over a border incident between Russia and the nominally independent emirate of Afghanistan – I say nominally independent, as while after various disastrous wars in Afghanistan throughout the nineteenth century, Britain had largely left Afghanistan to the Afghans, except for foreign policy, especially where Imperial Russia was concerned.

The British were worried, seriously worried, that as part of the Great Game Russia may somehow absorb Afghanistan as it had absorbed various other central Asian emirates, and that they would have Imperial Russia on the borders British India.

British India was key to the finances of the British Empire – without it the Empire was unsustainable, especially as the Australian colonies, New Zealand and Canada were self governing and did not contribute to the overall running of the Empire.

After the departure of British forces in the 1870s the Australian colonies largely looked after their own defence.

Some, such as gold rich Victoria took matters seriously and invested in defence with coastal defence batteries as at Port Fairy and a small coastal defence fleet. Others did less, and others such as Queensland were sort of in the middle with some coastal defence ships and a militia of sorts.

And then came 1885.

Imperial Germany was in the process of occupying what is now the northern half of PNG, and German warships were prowling off the coast of northern Australia, and somewhere, out in the Pacific was the Russian Empire’s pacific fleet.

Australia suddenly seemed very alone.

There was something not far short of panic, something reflected in the newspapers of the time.

And Cooktown, despite being an important steamship port and telegraph station was suddenly uncomfortably close to both the German forces in New Guinea and the Russian fleet, and a long way from the nearest help.

Not surprisingly there was a degree of panic with the town council asking if the government in Brisbane would pay to evecuate the (white) women and children, presumably while the men stayed to defend the town and hinterland from the tsar’s forces.

And this is where I suspect the myth of Cooktown being sent a Napoleonic war cannon to defend itself against the Russian fleet comes from.

I’ve no doubt the cannon was gifted by Queen Victoria, perhaps in connection with her 1887 Jubilee, and that this has somehow become mixed up with the military preparations in the event of a Russian invasion, and like all stories has grown in the telling….

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Another first world war propaganda postcard

Posted on August 15, 2025 by dgm

A nice example of a British propaganda card entitled ‘One of our tanks’ showing a British Mark IV tank

The text is quite legible and written in ink

My transcription of the text reads

Addressed to

Mrs Jas Souter
Tassetshill
Auchmacoy
Ellon

Posted

Aberdeen, 12.30PM Feb 5 1918 with standard George V 1/2d stamp

Message

This is the chap to swallow the notes! Hope you are all well, as we are here. How's Willie, he'll make a fine ploughman now. Tell him I was asking for him. From your loving nephew Mac.

Reverse illustration shows British Mark IV tank and caption
'copyright ELP Co - one of our tanks -passed by censor'

Auchmacoy still exists and is a farming estate outside of Ellon in Aberdeenshire. My first guess was that Tassetshill is a house or cottage name, or possibly a now disappeared fermtoun.

Google Maps only finds Auchmacoy, but the Royal Mail postcode finder admits to the existence of a South Tassetshill. The 1903 Ordnance Survey map shows Auchmacoy as a walled estate.

Tassethill lies a kilometre of two to the north east of Auchmacoy and, just to confuse things, is spelled Tassathill on the 1903 ordnance survey map and consists of a small settlement, probably a fermtoun (ie a group of farmworkers cottages clustered around a farmhouse and byres) to the north of Auchmacoy

Looking at a larger scale survey map from roughly the same period, this is confirmed with there being two fermtouns, north and south Tassatshill.

But the Royal Mail address finder only lists South Tassetshill. The 1965 Ordnance survey map still shows two groupings of buildings at Tassathill

My guess is that at some time in the last sixty or so years North Tassatshill was abandoned.

Scotlands people is not much help in identifying the addressee, there is no James Soutar (or his wife) listed in either the 1911 or 1921 census. This is not surprising as the land tenure system in the North East of Scotland meant that people would often move from job to job, rather than settling in one place.

The mention of Willie making a fine ploughman suggests that the Soutars were skilled agricultural workers, with a ploughman being a skilled occupation requiring the ploughman to be able to handle a team of heavy horses and plough a straight furrow – there even used to be annual ploughing championships where ploughmen competed for prize cups, and perhaps a small amount of cash.

As agricultural workers the Soutars would probably been exempt from conscription, as my grandfather, a tenant farmer further down the coast at St Cyrus was…

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Pfennigs and fillers

Posted on August 14, 2025 by dgm

You may remember that in a previous post I mentioned in passing that during the first world war, the German Empire withdrew the low value cupro nickel coins in favour or iron coins as the metal in the cupro nickel coins was required for the war effort.

In this illustration the top two pictures show a 1908 cupro nickel 5 pfennig coin and the bottom two its 1918 iron replacement.

As you can see they are essentially the same with the imperial eagle on one side and the value on the other, although the layout of the text on the iron replacement coin is slightly different.

But it wasn’t just Germany that was short of valuable raw materials. Its ally, Austria Hungary, a primarily agricultural entity, was also short of raw materials and also replaced its low value coinage with iron substitutes.

The Austro Hungarian currency was the Krone. Like the Euro today, the banknotes were the same across the empire, but  Austrian and Hungarian halves each minted their own coins, which were the same size and weight and circulated equally in both halves of the empire, just as today in the Eurozone your change comprises of a mixture of coins from different member countries.

Just to confuse things, the subdivision of the Krone was called the heller in Austria and the filler in Hungary – this is why the Czech Koruna is still notionally composed of 100 haller – the currency still uses the Czech name of the old Austro Hungarian currency and its subdivision.

The above example is a Hungarian 20 filler from 1920, the year the treaty of the Trianon, which formally ended the war between the allied powers and Hungary.

When the Austro Hungarian empire collapsed in 1918, Hungary was plunged into chaos.

First, it became a liberal republic, and then the communists seized power to set up a socialist people’s republic, which was in turn replaced by a conservative military dominated government.

Its leader, Miklos Horthy, styled himself Regent, although there was never an intention to invite either the last Habsburg emperor Karl, or his children back.

Hungary was a country ruled by a Regent without a king.

In the middle of this chaos, there was a war with Romania over Transylvania, with the Romanian army even occupying Budapest for a few days

Romanian cavalry in Budapest (public domain)

And in this chaos, currency reform was not a high priority and the Hungarian government carried on minting small change using the Habsburg era design, simply changing the date on the dies

Just to add to the confusion the Hungarian mint was located in what is now Slovakia, which in the breakup of the empire became part of the new Czechoslovak Republic.

The Hungarians hurriedly moved the coin minting machinery to Budapest, but while they changed the date on the coins, they left the mint mark (KB) below the value on the rear of the coin the same even though the coins were now being struck in Budapest.

Old iron coins, both heller and filler, can be picked up for a Euro or two in flea markets across central Europe, or else via ebay, which is where this slightly battered example came from …

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Air raids in World War One

Posted on July 27, 2025 by dgm

Sometimes, it seems that my at times dilettante research is a series of rabbit holes.

And so with my attempts to date a world war one propaganda postcard of a cartoon German soldier being pursued by a tank has led me to the little known story of German air raids on Britain.

While the story is almost forgotten today, the first world war saw the first bombing of civilian targets, both by Germany using airships and later large biplane bombers, and by both Britain and France using bombers.

Large bombers were not unknown at the start of world war one. Tsarist Russia was the first to build large biplane bombers, although they were mostly used to attack troop formations rather than civilian targets.

Germany began by using airships to bomb civilian targets in 1915. As attempts to bomb strategic locations they were mostly a failure, missing targets due to poor navigation and the general non manoeuvrability of the airships and poor bomb aiming technology.

However they were extremely effective in sowing fear among a civilian population unused to being attacked directly.

Raids carried on throughout the war but it was not until 1917 that German forces attempted a sustained series of attacks, perhaps because things were becoming increasingly difficult in Germany – there were food riots in 1916, and Ernesta Drinker records seeing increasingly longer queues for rations, in part due to the poor harvest in 1916.

By late 1916, the war had bogged down in the mud of Flanders to a bloody stalemate and had become a war of attrition. While the generals still talked in terms of military breakthroughs, the reality was that it was a war of attrition, and it was Germany, and its ally Austria Hungary, that were running out of resources and were increasingly unable to feed both their armies and civilian population.

It’s a sign of how short of materials Germany by 1916 that that year that the Reichsbank started to withdraw the cupro-nickel and copper small change (basically the copper 1 and 2 pfennig coins and the cupronickel 5 and 10 pfennig coins) replacing them with with aluminum 1 pfennig coins and iron 5 and 10 pfennig coins as the copper and nickel was needed for the war effort, leading to a chronic shortage of small change as they never managed to mint enough of the iron coins to replace the withdrawn cupronickel coins.

They withdrew the aluminum 1 pfennig after a year and never produced a substitute 2 pfennig coin.

The aim of the raids was to both dishearten the British population at large and to cause the British government to divert resources in terms of both aircraft and anti aircraft guns from the western front to defend London and the south east of England.

While, compared to World War 2, few people died as a result of the German air raids, they caused great disruption with at times more people sheltering in the London Underground than there were during the London Blitz of world war 2.

The Underworld – Walter Bayes (public domain via Imperial War Museum London)

Arrangements for the civilian population were initially uncoordinated, but with the increasing frequency of the raids, it became clear to the British government that they hadhhave not only a military response but also that they had to become more organised with regard air raid warnings and delegate local officials to help coordinate the response – in short not only to be seen to be doing something but to actually do something effectively.rit

The raids did not deliver much of an advantage to Germany, although they may have increased war weariness in the British civilian population, but whatever effect they had on the progress of the war was overshadowed by the Russian Revolution and the Bolsheviks suing for peace, allowing Germany to divert troops from the eastern front.

However, one can argue that the early experience of bombing raids helped in 1940 as it gave the British authorities a template as to how to manage the response to the immeasurably larger and effective air raids during the Blitz.

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A conundrum from the first world war

Posted on July 24, 2025 by dgm

I’ve been spending my money again and picked up this example of a British world war 1 propaganda postcard

which shows a German soldier running from an advancing (and presumably British) tank.

The rear of the postcard is a bit of a puzzle though

Someone has stuck a King George V green halfpenny stamp on the postcard and then a message has been written using the whole back of the card, including over the stamp.

I’ve done a rough transcription of the message and my reading of it is as follows

Dearest Sister,

just a line hoping to find you in the best of health, as it leaves me abouth the same as kate(?)lifted up.

[I] have not heard anything of your name for ages, but still live in happiness,  alls well at home except kiddies have got bad colds [.] I expect its to do with fetching the poor devils out of bed [...] its damn near time this war ended.

we have had snow for three weeks much so you can {leet?}

it's lovely hearing you are in a perfect state of remaine(?)

you loving B

Notes:

Remaine is an obsolete form of remain and can mean remaining content.

Leet is an older form of let in some english dialects

Post card has a King George V half pence stamp but no address

The message is not quite coherent, but it’s interesting that there is a definite hint of war weariness in the message

My guess is that the postcard had come with the stamp already stuck on and the writer decided to use the whole back of the postcard for the message, perhaps enclosing it in an envelope.

Given that it mentions snow, I presume in England, on the ground for three weeks, it suggests that the card was written in winter, but which winter?

While tanks were first used in combat by the British in September 1916, they did not see significant use until 1917. Both the winters of 1916 and 1917 were particularly harsh on the western front with food riots occurring in Germany in the winter of 1916.

However, my gut feeling is that the card dates from the winter of 1917, simply because it was not until the British began using the Mark IV tank that tanks began to perform effectively…

[update 26/07/2025]

I’ve had a second look at the text and where the writer writes

… fetching the poor devils out of their beds

I now read it as continuing on raid nights

which I’m guessing is a reference to the German air raids on the south east of England by both Zeppelin air ships and in 1917 also by Gotha bombers…

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